Julia Bloch’s lyric and prose poems blend the personal and the political to, she says, “negotiate tensions between individual forms of expression and webs of social meaning.” Her most recent work employs essayistic modes and involves what she describes as “erasure and documentary methods that blur the line between poetry and critique.” Bloch’s forthcoming book, The Soft Forms, utilizes prose poems to imitate the complexity of memory and desire by creating variable breaks across each page and phrases that often interlock but sometimes swerve away from one another, mimicking the way time skips and lingers. Her in-progress, memoir-inflected Futurist California explores “queer futurity and intergenerational grief” and will draw from forms of found text in personal and public archival materials. Bloch is the author of Valley Fever (2015) and Letters to Kelly Clarkson (2012), as well as several chapbooks. In 2013, she was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and the Omnidawn Poetry Prize. Bloch is currently director of the creative writing program at the University of Pennsylvania, and previously served as associate director of Kelly Writers House. She holds an MFA from Mills College and a PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania.
